American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is
by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away
at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this
institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient
market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century
America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing
inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics
railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers,
political subversion, environmental destruction, and "wage slavery." How did a nation
committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power
become transformed in one century?
Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs
broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small
and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped
legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry
and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the
model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits.
Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of
our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations.
Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant,
and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines
echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives
that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us
down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations
in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical
genre.
Charles Perrow is Research Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University.
Two of his six books are prizewinners: Normal Accidents (Princeton) and The AIDS
Disaster. Complex Organizations (McGraw Hill) is in its third edition. He has written
seventy articles and book chapters. Perrow has been a visiting professor at the London
Graduate School of Business Studies, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and
the Institute for Advanced Study.

International trade has shaped the modern world, yet until now no single book has
been available for both economists and general readers that traces the history of
the international economy from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Power
and Plenty fills this gap, providing the first full account of world trade and development
over the course of the last millennium.
Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke examine the successive waves of globalization and
"deglobalization" that have occurred during the past thousand years, looking closely
at the technological and political causes behind these long-term trends. They show
how the expansion and contraction of the world economy has been directly tied to
the two-way interplay of trade and geopolitics, and how war and peace have been critical
determinants of international trade over the very long run. The story they tell is
sweeping in scope, one that links the emergence of the Western economies with economic
and political developments throughout Eurasia centuries ago. Drawing extensively
upon empirical evidence and informing their systematic analysis with insights from
contemporary economic theory, Findlay and O'Rourke demonstrate the close interrelationships
of trade and warfare, the mutual interdependence of the world's different regions,
and the crucial role these factors have played in explaining modern economic growth.
Power and Plenty is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the origins of today's
international economy, the forces that continue to shape it, and the economic and
political challenges confronting policymakers in the twenty-first century.
Ronald Findlay is the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics at Columbia University.
He is the author of Factor Proportions, Trade, and Growthand Trade, Development,
and Political Economy. Kevin H. O'Rourke is professor of economics at Trinity College,
Dublin. He is the coauthor of Globalization and History.

Douglass C. North
Изд-во:
Princeton University Press, 2005, cерия "Princeton Economic History of the Western World", 2208 с.

In this landmark work, a Nobel Prize-winning economist develops a new way of understanding the process by which economies change. Douglass North inspired a revolution in economic history a generation ago by demonstrating that economic performance is determined largely by the kind and quality of institutions that support markets. As he showed in two now classic books that inspired the New Institutional Economics (today a subfield of economics), property rights and transaction costs are fundamental determinants. Here, North explains how different societies arrive at the institutional infrastructure that greatly determines their economic trajectories.
North argues that economic change depends largely on "adaptive efficiency," a society's effectiveness in creating institutions that are productive, stable, fair, and broadly accepted--and, importantly, flexible enough to be changed or replaced in response to political and economic feedback. While adhering to his earlier definition of institutions as the formal and informal rules that constrain human economic behavior, he extends his analysis to explore the deeper determinants of how these rules evolve and how economies change. Drawing on recent work by psychologists, he identifies intentionality as the crucial variable and proceeds to demonstrate how intentionality emerges as the product of social learning and how it then shapes the economy's institutional foundations and thus its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.
Understanding the Process of Economic Change accounts not only for past institutional change but also for the diverse performance of present-day economies. This major work is therefore also an essential guide to improving the performance of developing countries.

Philip Hoffman shatters the widespread myth that traditional agricultural societies
in early modern Europe were socially and economically stagnant and ultimately dependent
on wide-scale political revolution for their growth. Through a richly detailed historical
investigation of the peasant agriculture of ancien-régime France, the author
uncovers evidence that requires a new understanding of what constituted economic
growth in such societies. His arguments rest on a measurement of long-term growth
that enables him to analyze the economic, institutional, and political factors that
explain its forms and rhythms. In comparing France with England and Germany, Hoffman
arrives at fresh answers to some classic questions: Did French agriculture lag behind
farming in other countries? If so, did the obstacles in French agriculture lurk within
peasant society itself, in the peasants' culture, in their communal property rights,
or in the small scale of their farms? Or did the obstacles hide elsewhere, in politics,
in the tax system, or in meager opportunities for trade? The author discovers that
growth cannot be explained by culture, property rights, or farm size, and argues
that the real causes of growth derived from politics and gains from trade. By challenging
other widely held beliefs, such as the nature of the commons and the workings of
the rural economy, Hoffman offers a new analysis of peasant society and culture,
one based on microeconomics and game theory and intended for a wide range of social
scientists.

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history:
Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising
similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows,
as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high
in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of
households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and
Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout
the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive
products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.
Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes
much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's
failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth
in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do
with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of
needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest
Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and
remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields.
Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive,
labor-saving paths.
Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after
1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral
regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a
result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth
did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could
have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground
and overseas.

In the last two centuries, agriculture has been an outstanding, if somewhat neglected,
success story. It has fed an ever-growing population with an increasing variety of
products at falling prices, even as it has released a growing number of workers to
the rest of the economy. This book, a comprehensive history of world agriculture
during this period, explains how these feats were accomplished.
Feeding the World synthesizes two hundred years of agricultural development throughout
the world, providing all essential data and extensive references to the literature.
It covers, systematically, all the factors that have affected agricultural performance:
environment, accumulation of inputs, technical progress, institutional change, commercialization,
agricultural policies, and more. The last chapter discusses the contribution of agriculture
to modern economic growth. The book is global in its reach and analysis, and represents
a grand synthesis of an enormous topic.

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial
Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century
England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization
make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer?
In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests
a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains
the wealth, and the poverty, of nations.
Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the
sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century
Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization.
He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes
by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience,
and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education.
The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement
and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces
that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods
of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the
notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments
such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations.
A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically
developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global
economic history is understood.
Gregory Clark is chair of the economics department at the University of California,
Davis. He has written widely about economic history.

In 1945, many Europeans still heated with coal, cooled their food with ice, and lacked
indoor plumbing. Today, things could hardly be more different. Over the second half
of the twentieth century, the average European's buying power tripled, while working
hours fell by a third. The European Economy since 1945 is a broad, accessible, forthright
account of the extraordinary development of Europe's economy since the end of World
War II. Barry Eichengreen argues that the continent's history has been critical to
its economic performance, and that it will continue to be so going forward.
Challenging standard views that basic economic forces were behind postwar Europe's
success, Eichengreen shows how Western Europe in particular inherited a set of institutions
singularly well suited to the economic circumstances that reigned for almost three
decades. Economic growth was facilitated by solidarity-centered trade unions, cohesive
employers' associations, and growth-minded governments--all legacies of Europe's
earlier history. For example, these institutions worked together to mobilize savings,
finance investment, and stabilize wages.
However, this inheritance of economic and social institutions that was the solution
until around 1973--when Europe had to switch from growth based on brute-force investment
and the acquisition of known technologies to growth based on increased efficiency
and innovation--then became the problem.
Thus, the key questions for the future are whether Europe and its constituent nations
can now adapt their institutions to the needs of a globalized knowledge economy,
and whether in doing so, the continent's distinctive history will be an obstacle
or an asset.

This paper surveys the small, yet growing, literature that employs game theory for
economic history analysis. It elaborates on the promise and challenge of integrating
game theoretical and economic history analyses and presents the approaches taken
in conducting such an integration. Most of the essay, however, is devoted to presenting
studies in economic history that utilize game theory as their main analytical framework.
Studies are presented based on their substance to highlight the range of potential
topics in economic history that can be and had been enriched through a game theoretical
analysis.

This paper is a draft of the introduction to the chapter on voluntary, nonprofit,
and religious entities and activities slated to appear in the Millennial
Edition of Historical Statistics of the United States. Conceding the various
problematic definitions of the "nonprofit
sector," the essay offers a rationale for the broadly inclusive approach to the selection
of historical statistics of institutions and activities presented in the chapter.
In addition, it reviews the challenges and opportunities for researchers working
on the statistical aspects of nonprofit, voluntary, and religious organizations.
The essay includes samples of the statistical series that will appear in HSUS.